I've experienced this first-hand while employed in Europe--the American-based University where I taught had the ideal of creating a recipe or program which told "instructors" exactly what to teach and thus made it easy for any given teacher to be replaced... I saw something similar in the American owned and managed International School where I taught. Needless to say, when you teach at an actual university in the United States you not only write your own syllabus, but also choose your text/s....something I was not allowed to do at the American owned and managed "university" where I taught in Central Europe. (The link below is to "Democracy Now".)
The real problem here is very broad and very political.
When I worked as a "freelance" language teacher in Vienna, one of my colleagues understood the problem very well, when he remarked to me that when the manager of the "German department" at the "Institute" where we both taught increased her control, and specified exactly what he had to teach, that simply left him less room for creativity.
It is an old piece of anarchist (and other) political philosophies that every human being has a right to be creative.
As Adorno said in his essay "Leisure Time", the human need for culture and creativity is an intrinsic right, not merely something to be bestowed upon us by employers nor the sort of gift the cultural conservative imagines it to be. We are patronized insofar as such vital elements of human life are treated as extras--as if we were being granted privileges when we are merely allowed to be human.
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